‘One of the greatest discoveries in the history of science’

IT’S being hailed as the discovery that will unlock the secrets of the
universe.

Boffins at research centre CERN in Switzerland believe they have finally
found the elusive Higgs boson – or “God particle” – after months of
experiments with the vast underground Large Hadron Collider.

Sun Professor Brian Cox has been involved with the multi-million-pound
project from the start.

Here, he explains why this scientific discovery is the most important of
his lifetime:

Yesterday’s announcement of the discovery at CERN of a new particle, which
looks very much like a Higgs particle, is probably the greatest scientific
moment in my lifetime, and one of the greatest discoveries in the history of
science.

Let me explain why.

Back in the Sixties, Peter Higgs and others were involved in trying to make a
theory, known as the Standard Model, make sense.

The Standard Model is a mathematical description of nature.

It contains all the sub-atomic building blocks of the universe, and describes
how they interact with each other through three of the four known forces.

Those forces are the electromagnetic force, the strong and weak nuclear forces
that operate deep within the heart of matter, and gravity.

Only the force of gravity stands stubbornly outside of the Standard Model.

If you want to know how the molecules that make up your body stick together in
the way they do; how the sun shines; why the sky is blue; why water is a
liquid at the temperatures found on Earth or even why you don’t fall through
the floor when your atoms are mostly empty space — the answers are contained
within the equations of the Standard Model.

It is the most accurate and successful description of the natural world we
have, and as such it is one of the great achievements of 20th Century
science.

It does, however, make a very weird prediction that, until yesterday, was
merely conjecture.

The Standard Model says that empty space is not empty. Instead, it is crammed
full of Higgs particles.

Every little cube of space in front of your eyes now, every little cube of
space inside your body and every little cube of space everywhere in the
universe is literally full of them.

That’s an odd thought. But it gets odder still. The reason you are solid, at
the deepest possible level, is because the particles that make up your body
are constantly bumping into the Higgs particles, zigzagging their way
through the universe and in doing so acquiring mass.

If they didn’t do this, you wouldn’t exist.

So how did these Higgs particles get there?

They are what is called a condensate, and their emergence is similar to the
appearance of ice crystals on a cold window pane on a winter’s night.

As the universe cooled after the Big Bang, the Higgs particles condensed
seemingly “out of nothing” in the same way that the ice on your window
appears “from thin air”.

The ice doesn’t really appear out of nothing, of course. What happens is that
as the temperature drops, it becomes favourable for the water droplets in
the air to change into ice.

The technical name for this is a “phase transition” and it is this that — we
now know — happened less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang,
filling the universe with a condensate of Higgs particles.

The Higgs, therefore, is an integral part of our universe, giving the building
blocks of everything — from stars and planets to you and me — our mass.

This is, of course, worth knowing, but I think it’s only part of the reason
why yesterday’s announcement is so wonderful.

There is a deeper reason why I am so excited and over-awed by this discovery.
The Higgs particle was predicted to exist almost 50 years ago by some clever
physicists doing mathematics.

Nearly 90 countries came together at CERN, a laboratory in Geneva, to share
their expertise, and the cost, to build the most complex machine ever
assembled.

In doing so, they pioneered some of the most exciting and useful technologies
in the world today, from the World Wide Web to medical imaging machines such
as PET scanners and proton beam therapy treatments for cancer.

But what they really wanted to do was explore the universe, because they were
curious.

So they built a tunnel, 16 miles in circumference, and placed inside it two
beams of particles travelling at 99.999999 per cent the speed of light.

They arranged for these beams to collide together, recreating the conditions
that were present less than a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, up
to 600million times every second.

They built two giant detectors, called ATLAS and CMS, to photograph these
collisions, collected the images on thousands of terabytes of computer
disks, and built a whole new World Wide Web called The Grid to search
through them.

And yesterday, after sifting through billions upon billions of pictures, they
announced that they had found a few hundred collisions in which
never-before-seen particles — almost certainly Higgs particles — were
produced, proving a 50-year old theory based on mathematical elegance.

I am reminded of a quote from a hero of mine, Sir Humphry Davy. He was a
scientist who lived and worked at the turn of the 19th Century, a time that
has been called The Age Of Wonder.

Davy did tremendously useful things, such as inventing the Davy Lamp, which
revolutionised the safety of coal mining.

But at heart, he was a romantic and a believer in the unlimited capacity of
science and engineering to transform our world for the better.

When asked why we explore — why we continue to do science when it feels as if
we know enough about the workings of the universe, he said: “Nothing is more
fatal to the progress of the human mind as to suppose that our views of
science are ultimate; that there are no mysteries in nature; that our
triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer.”

This is as true now as it was then.

Davy went on to mentor Michael Faraday, whose work in electricity and
magnetism laid the foundations for the modern world.

Exploration, driven by curiosity and wonder, time and again delivers rewards
beyond the imagination.

So congratulations to all the thousands of scientists and engineers who work
at CERN, and all the physicists who contributed to this giant leap in our
understanding of the universe.

In a hundred years, this week in July 2012 will be remembered as a golden week
for science and civilisation.